The Memento
Page 1
Copyright © 2016 Christy Ann Conlin
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Conlin, Christy Ann, author
The memento / Christy Ann Conlin.
ISBN 978-0-385-66241-3 (paperback).–ISBN 978-0-385-68616-7
(epub)
I. Title.
PS8555.O5378M44 20167 C813′.6 C2015-906220-9
C2015-906221-7
The author would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage.
Lyrics from the following songs appear in the novel:
“Down by the Salley Gardens,” William Butler Yeats (1909 set by Herbert Hughes to melody of traditional Irish air “The Moorlough Shore”); “She Moved Through the Fair,” Irish traditional; “White Coral Bells,” American traditional; “Slumber Boat” by Alice Riley (1898); “Connemara Cradle Song” (Irish traditional)
Excerpts from “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1844) appear in Chapter 10, Part 1.
Part II epigram poem by Yosano Akiko translated from the Japanese by Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese, 1976.
Scripture quotations in Part II, Chapter 1, from the King James Bible: Matthew 10:32-33; Luke 15:10 and 1 Corinthians 5:11.
Cover Painting, End of Spring © Marie Cameron
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v3.1
For Andy Brown
&
Millie Laporte
The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives—the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.
EUDORA WELTY
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I
1. THE TWELFTH-BORN
2. HEAR THE WIND BLOW
3. THE MEMENTO
4. THE TEA HOUSE
5. MARGARET AND HECTOR
6. COME, MARGARET, WE’LL TELL YOU A TALE
7. DOWN THE LONG DARK HALL
8. THE ARRIVAL
9. THE MAIDS
10. THE COUSINS
11. THE SECOND COMING
12. THE WATER HOUSE
13. SAGES, LEAVE YOUR CONTEMPLATIONS
14. LONG IS THE MEMORY OF THE MUTE SWAN
15. THE DEAD SAMURAI
16. THE DISTILLATION OF THE ROSE
17. THE BOY IN THE WAVES
18. SHE LAID HER SNOW-WHITE HAND
19. LABYRINTH
20. ROSE ABSOLUTE
21. THE GARDEN PARTY
22. THE EXPEDITION
Part II
1. THE BELIEVERS
2. A PALE-BLUE DRESS
3. DOWN THE DARK LANE
4. MISS AGATHA PARKER
5. THE SWAN HOUSE
6. THE HOBGOBBLIES
7. POMELINE
8. THE ISLAND
9. THE DARK ROLLING DEEP
10. THE LADY ON THE BEACH
11. I FOUND YOU IN A PICTURE
Acknowledgements
Part I
But we can’t possibly have a garden-party with a man dead just outside the front gate.
“The Garden Party,” KATHERINE MANSFIELD
A ghost must speak in D minor, though on this point Gluck, Mozart and Rossini differ.
ANONYMOUS, Extracts from the Diary of a Dilettante, THE HARMONICON, LONDON, 1828
1.
The Twelfth-Born
I WAS TWELVE.
That is the year I must tell you about.
The cicadas buzz on this hot August afternoon as the season draws to a close. There is a mirror by the big door here at Petal’s End but I have not looked in it this summer. I am not yet ready to see what might be reflected. It’s a tradition in these parts to have a mirror outside by the front door. You can take a peek before entering. Not to see how fine you are looking but to see what’s at your back. Even those who don’t believe in the Mountain traditions will hesitate a moment before taking such a mirror down, and to this day you’ll still find them mirrors on the century houses in Lupin Cove and across the mountain. There’s an even older story, though, which most have forgotten. The mirror is there so if you’ve been to a funeral you can see if the dead followed you home, which they will do if they have business yet to resolve with the living. But there is no story about what you are to do if a dead one is there behind you in the mirror. Marigold Parker, the grand matriarch at Petal’s End, was afraid of the hobgobblies, as she called the dead. She checked the mirror in the evening, for that’s when she said they came around. They’d slip in the door behind you or come in an open window. They would get inside you and fold up your soul with their long spindly fingers, she told us. The old story was wrong, Marigold said. Ghosts were not confined to the funereal period—the dead kept their own schedule.
Grampie advised we pay no mind to Marigold, but nonetheless keep an eye on the mirror. We had one over at Grampie’s cottage, where I lived with him as a young child. The mirror was by the door when he moved in and it stayed there, for Grampie believed in tradition. But Grampie was never afraid of what we might see behind us. Best to know what is on your heels, he would say.
Grampie’s father had been a poor dirt farmer who supplemented his living with beehives and making turpentine and furniture polish. My great-grandfather bought the place from the Parkers when they were selling a few pieces of what they called their vast demesne at Petal’s End after the Great War. The Parker money was endless and flowed down through the generations. They parcelled off parts of the land to returning soldiers. Out of compassion, people said. Out of pity. They practically gave the land away, expecting only gratitude in perpetuity as payment.
Grampie was in the next war, but he never spoke of that—only his limp told the story. He was not a young man when he went off, but the army would take who they could get in those last few years, Grampie said, even a farmer and a gardener. So many younger than him died, and their bodies would often not come home. This drove him to enlist, thinking it would lessen the sorrow. He was wrong about that.
Grampie called himself the accidental artist. Ma told me he found his gift for painting when he drew for the army. They called him a war artist, but he never showed me a single sketch from that time. He come home to Lupin Cove a changed man and went back to work at Petal’s End as a gardener, his leg not fit for walking any distance. His eyes looked the same but they could see different.
It’s easier to rest here in my chair with the years heavy on my bones than to rise and stand by the door. There is a mirror in my mind’s eye, and my recollections lure me into the harsh light whether I want them to or not. The birds sing, high and clear. It is June. It is the last day of school before summer vacation. It is also my birthday. I
am twelve that day. Grampie is three years dead and I live over at Petal’s End with Loretta, the longtime housekeeper tending the place for the Parker family, who don’t come no more but insist the estate be kept like they’ll be taking up residence any day. They are more phantom than alive, for we rarely see them.
The bus brings us down off the mountain, away from the rocky shores of Lupin Cove, down to the valley. When I get off the school bus I avoid them kids at school who laugh and point. Those kinds of people, they never change. What I learned is that all them idiots in the halls of school are the same people you meet in all the halls of life. I keep my head down. They laugh at my clothes, at my scar—they say I’m the girl who got knocked on her head, the girl who lives in the shack over by the bay where there is nothing but lobsters and rocky beach and the strange island that seems to float on the waves. I stopped going to school for a time when I lived with Grampie, the day they strapped a boy in front of the class to scare us good. No sir, I will not go back, I told him. They tried to make me but Grampie said I was staying home and he’d teach me what I needed to know. It wasn’t until he died and I was living with Loretta that I went back, to make her happy.
Loretta was from down in the valley and came to work at Petal’s End when she was a young woman in need of sanctuary. She worked as a kitchen maid and babysitter at first, moving up to housekeeper and cook, doing a bit of everything as she got older. Good help was hard to find after the war. Grampie got her the job. Loretta owed my grandfather for a long-ago kindness, she said, even though the man was never one who kept score. She was the same age as Ma, and they both had babies when they were unmarried girls. Loretta had been shamed for having a baby unwed. Unlike Ma, she gave her baby away, and she never directly spoke of it until the summer I was twelve.
On the last day of school we do crossword puzzles and word searches and play silly games. The teacher talks about summer vacation plans. She says it is Fancy Mosher’s birthday and she makes the class sing to me, although the only voices I hear are hers and Art Comeau’s. Art and I have grown up together and travel back and forth on that godforsaken bus. Art is my only true friend. This summer, we’ll be Loretta’s helpers at Petal’s End and we want nothing more than for the school year to finish up and to get working. The Parkers are actually paying us, a real summer job, not just picking berries. There is much to do, what with the rumour Lady Marigold Parker is finally coming back. No one gave Loretta any information about when or if any other Parkers would be coming out with her. That’s not on their mind, keeping us abreast of their plans, no sir. They’re fighting, we know that much, the Parker women are feuding. But that summer day in the classroom Art and I are just excited thinking how Petal’s End might come back to life, alive again with all them stories we’d grown up on, the parties and the exotic visitors from all over creation.
I’m on the steps at school waiting for Art, eating my sandwich and the birthday cookies Loretta made. Art is in the music room helping the teacher tidy it for summer. He is late and I am almost finished lunch. Other kids are off on the lawn under the deep shade of the red maples, eating and laughing, happy in the way summer makes people. The solitude of the concrete steps is where I feel best. I chew on ham and fresh lettuce leaves, lettuce from the kitchen garden at Petal’s End. Loretta and I started it from seed and it came early. We grow all our own vegetables in the summer. I’m thinking about that when Ma arrives.
I hear her car before I see it, the muffler about to go, Ma gunning the gas. She has a relic of a car. It’s not intentionally an antique. Ma won’t ever buy anything new or full price. The enormous lilac hedges are blooming between the school building and the parking lot. Through the blossoms I watch Ma park. She shuts the engine off but she doesn’t get out. Cigarette smoke trails out the car window.
I didn’t see my mother much after I went to live with Grampie in his home called the Tea House when I was three years old. They took me from her, out of the back seat of her car in a ditch full of flowers on the side of the road rolling down into the valley. We’d been on our way to return her booze bottles. Ma was blind drunk, she didn’t see nor hear the police sirens or see their big hands reach for me in the back seat, where I was lying with a concussion and a cut on my cheek swirling from my lip right across my cheekbone and into my hair. Grampie said later it was like a stem, my mouth a red flower. It faded pale white over the years, but if you look careful it still weaves its way through the lines on my face. In the tender evening light even those wrinkles diminish but the scar remains. It’s the way of the evening, when form and time lose shape.
The Tea House used to be called the Woodcutter’s Cottage, built for the man who cut wood for Petal’s End back when the whole place was heated with wood and coal. I don’t recall his name. But when I was a child it was called the Tea House because people came to take tea with Grampie. A house takes on the way of its dwellers. For years I thought it was just a social thing, but later I learned that when they came with their teacups and their fearful sad eyes they came for dark reasons.
It’s blistering that last day of school as I stare at Ma’s car, smoke hanging in the air. The valley offers no relief, not like over on the bay shore in Lupin Cove where huge tides sweep in cool breezes and the stark sun disappears inside mists and clouds. Then with a puff the haze will clear and unfurl an endless banner of blue sky streaming overhead. I sit dumbly on the steps finishing my lunch like I’m expecting Ma, but I am not expecting her. It’s not the car she crashed when I was three. This is the sixth car since that one. Finally, the rusty door flies open and out she lunges. She’s done up for the weather in a tight summer dress with a black bra hanging out, and she comes strutting over in her high heels with long hair piled fantastically high, dark Mosher eyes all lined, big long lashes, red lips a line of sunset cutting through her cheeks. Fifty-seven years old. Seeing her from a distance, it does seem time screeched to a stop for her. She never got fat like lots of ladies, not even having twelve kids. But up close Ma is a skeleton. Her slinky walk is how she keeps her balance in them castle-high shoes, hips swaying side to side. Her face is lined from too many smokes, too much booze, from my brother dying. She looks like she walked out of the past, in what were once her best out-on-the-town clothes, now faded and dated, dyed black hair frizzing out in all directions. Ma had two kinds of outfits. Her working clothes, simple cotton dresses she sewed herself, for picking fruit and vegetables and cleaning houses. And her going-out clothes, the tight, sexy ones accompanied by heavy perfume and makeup. She wore her going-out clothes for weddings, funerals, picnics, parties and bars.
Ma sees me right away, not that it would have been any better if she’d gone strutting and swaying all over the school property singing out Fancy Mosher, Fancy Mosher, fucking little Fancy Mosher. She’s holding her own, flouncing toward the stairs, but she’s teetering real bad. Ma stops to light up another cigarette and lets out a horrendous cough and I know she is back on the gin again, singing her gin songs, the rattling cough and throat clearing. The only time she yells is when she’s drunk. Near the bottom of the steps there is some dirt and grass where her heels have speared the lawn and I hear the familiar click click as she comes up the stairs, her cheap sunglasses covering her eyes.
I see Art coming along then, rambling at first, but the second he spots Ma he breaks into a run. She continues up the steps, clinging to the railing, and stands in front of me with her hands on her hips. Art comes up behind her, not sure what to do. He’s winded. It’s hard to catch your breath in thick clammy air.
Ma lifts up her sunglasses and rubs her eyes, liner smudged, crooked. You could tell how much gin by how straight the line, how smudged the shadow. She must have been crying all the way down the mountain and into the valley. Ma knows better than to come here. Loretta already told her to stay away from me for the summer, on account of what Ma did in early spring. Yet here she is, only two months later, tap tap tapping to see where she can get in. I rest my eyes on the sky. It’s no panic for
me, Ma like this. It is her normal state. It’s just that her man, Ronnie, usually reins her in. Where could he be? I start humming.
Ma opens her mouth and a slow purr comes out of her. “Fancy, you got a sweet voice, and you sound like one of them red birds your Grampie loved so.” She takes another wobbly step. “You’re special to me, Fancy. You know you are, don’t ya, Honeysuckle? I waited so long for you, and you were born when the air was sugar fancy, flowers as far as I could see, my summer baby. The rest of them was all born when it was cold. But not you. You were born in the heat. Early in the morning when the sky was on fire and the air was so humid it was crawling in the windows.” She gives a burp and a laugh comes out of her mouth as she runs her hand up and down the railing, her fingernails tinkling on the metal. She sits down right close to me, playing with the curls falling down by her eyes as she did when she was young, but the gesture’s not beguiling no more. She strokes my knee. “Today is your day, Honeysuckle. You are the twelfth-born. I counted off them babies until I had you. John Lee was my first baby. Then two, three, four, five, six. You see, I knew about the story and the numbers. Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. And they stopped coming. But oh, I waited. Yes, I did, I waited ten more years just for you. Your father, he said I tricked him, getting my fancy baby but not keeping him around. Isn’t that just like a man? A lonely man is an easy man. But I needed a twelfth because of the Mosher ways. You know what your grandfather could do with his teacups and paints. He could have helped me. But he said no, he would not talk to my baby boy. It wasn’t my fault, what happened.” Ma’s voice stops like she’s crashed into a cliff.
She sees me staring at her smeared makeup and whatever softness was in her voice slinks away.
“Don’t you look at me like that, Fancy. You know what those paintings were about.” She takes a deep breath and smiles so sweet I can feel the teeth rotting out of my head. Ma lurches up as though she suddenly remembered she needs to be somewhere even though she’s not sure where that might be. Art’s behind her with his hands out, in case she falls. Her arm drapes on the railing and she slouches back. She won’t be upright for much longer.